China confronts Internet rumors and trashy TV

Along with cracking down on what it considers trashy TV ---
China's State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) said
Tuesday that it will limit entertainment and add more news and other programs
that "build morality and promote the core values of socialism" -- the
government is going after what it calls rumor mongers on the Internet. The BBC and others
reported on the Internet crackdown after the official Chinese news agency Xinhua
released a short item on Tuesday, announcing that three people had been
detained or arrested for publishing incorrect information, or "spreading rumors
online," as Xinhua put it.

One was held in local police custody for 15 days for
posting a falsified personal income tax document from the State
Administration of Taxation in August; another for posting a fake news item
about a sick man who killed eight village leaders in Yunnan. The
third was a site editor who was given a warning from his employer for
publishing a microblog entry about an air force fighter crash without confirming
the source and facts, Xinhua said.

The moves are a step worse from August, when we reported in
an alert --- Chinese
microblog suspends accounts for false rumors --- that Beijing apparently was
trying to deter journalists and bloggers from reporting breaking news. CPJ
Deputy Director Robert Mahoney pointed out that "Chinese authorities concerned
by rumors would be better served by allowing free reporting in the nation's
media -- not by stepping up online controls." Still, given China's dynamic
online community (by the middle of 2010, the semi-official China Internet Information
Center counted 420 million Internet users, with 364 million of them having
broadband service) it is not surprising that the possibility of new rules has
been under discussion within China's very active blogging and microblogging
communities.

In August, as we noted in our alert, Communist Party papers
like the Global Times and People's Daily had been criticizing
social networks in the weeks before the accounts were suspended, apparently
preparing for a crackdown. But after Tuesday's SARFT announcement, a Global Times
op-ed was surprisingly critical of the restrictions on what the government
considers TV programming that is less than uplifting. In "TV
content restrictions quash creativity," the paper's argument, in part, was

There's no doubt of the influence
TV, video games and online content has on people. But can we really blame a TV
show involving desperate single men and women finding dates on the moral decay
of our society? Are we to understand that the reason people turn
a blind eye to car accident victims is because they have been watching too
much China's
Got Talent?

I'm dying to see what entertainment
can boost my morality. Red songs? It's a long shot. After all, Chinese viewers
have tuned into news programs including Xinwen Lianbo [CCTV's daily flagship
news broadcast] for decades, yet look where we are now on the morality scale.

The comments that followed the piece were reasoned, with
some acknowledging the need for a programming upgrade on China's TV, but the
one that best reflected my attitude was this, from someone using the name Zhongshan:

Well written piece! Straight to the
point. Must have a lot of guts writing those stuff. I really don't see how a
few reality programs are somehow the moral degradation of an entire society.
Perhaps CCTV is just too jealous that HunanTV can produce so much better shows
than the usual crap on "central television."

Banning time-travel shows? That's got to be a classic. Perhaps the Party does
not want "Back to the Future" re-enacted in China because it's too
afraid of its own history. Sad and funny.

Bob Dietz, coordinator of CPJ’s Asia Program, has reported across the continent for news outlets such as CNN and Asiaweek. He has led numerous CPJ missions, including ones to Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka. Follow him on Twitter @cpjasia and Facebook @ CPJ Asia Desk.

How many journalists are jailed in China? Censorship means we don't know

March 12, 2019 1:14 PM ET

Reporting on China's harassment of journalists has never been easy. Lately it's been getting much harder, which suggests that conditions for the press could be worsening. At least 47 journalists were jailed in China at the time of CPJ's 2018 prison census and I am investigating at least a...

On International Women's Day, CPJ has highlighted the cases of female journalists jailed around the world in retaliation for their work. At least 33 of the 251 journalists in jail at the time of CPJ's prison census are women. At least one of those--Turkish reporter and artist Zehra Dogan--was...

Working conditions for foreign correspondents in China further deteriorated in 2018, according to the Foreign Correspondents' Club of China annual survey. The report, "Under Watch: FCCC Annual Working Conditions Report 2018," highlights growing digital and human surveillance, as well as government interference in reporting in China....

In 2010, after four years of offering Chinese users a heavily censored version of its search engine, Google decided it would no longer block search results at the request of the Chinese state. "Our objection is to those forces of totalitarianism," Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, told The New York...

In its annual report, released July 29, the Hong Kong Journalists Association found that press freedom has gone backward as the administrative region seeks to implement legislation to criminalize critical opinions toward China's "one country" policy and Beijing....